This great country of ours never got around to passing anti-lynching legislation, but the state of South Carolina did. You probably know the name of one South Carolinian arrested for that horrible offense: NBA All-Star and future hall of famer, Kevin Garnett. Yes, South Carolina's lynching statute was ostensibly put on the book in response to black people being killed by mobs, and yes, Garnett is black. But South Carolina worded and applied its statute in such a way that even schoolyard brawls qualified as lynchings. Garnett, who reportedly stood on his campus and watched his friends beat up a white boy, was also scooped up by authorities and booked with second-degree lynching, a crime that called for up to 20 years in prison.

Garnett was able to participate in a first-time offender program and get his record cleared. Then he got the hell out of South Carolina. Who could blame him? The Associated Press reported in 2003 that 69 percent of the people targeted for South Carolina's lynching prosecutions were young black men and that 67 percent of those convicted of lynching were black.

The NFL has floated the idea of penalizing teams 15 yards when one of its players uses the word "n----r," and I can't help but think that the rule will become what South Carolina's lynching statute became: a seemingly helpful response to black people's abuse that morphs into a new way to hold them back. Hold them back literally in this case, to the tune of 15 yards. The league's competition committee may enact the rule at the NFL's owners' meeting next month.

It's not hard to imagine one black man using that word with another black man on the grid-iron and a white man blowing his whistle. White people generally refuse to sanction the idea that black people can use language among black people that white people cannot. Thus, this proposal seems less like a response to the harassment former Miami Dolphins player Jonathan Martin says he got from teammate Richie Incognito last season and more like the very embodiment of white supremacy and power: If we can't say it, y'all can't either.

In the most generous view, the NFL's proposal comes across as a cowardly attempt to substitute wisdom with a rule. Rather than acknowledge that language is an ever-shifting organism that depends on context, intent and perception, rather than wait for allegations of harassment or abuse to be made before deciding what should be done, the NFL would rather deal in absolutes. The league would rather decide that its professional athletes - about as foul-mouthed a demographic as you're likely to find anywhere - can say just about anything and everything but that.

But if I were a black player in the NFL, I wouldn't fight this. No, sir. I'd just use the racially offensive language that the NFL tolerates and profits from: Hey, my redskin, what's up?